DOCUMENTARY - DOCUMENTARY RESEARCH - REVIEW OF 'DREAMS OF LIFE'

Dreams of life is a hard-hitting, cutting edge, dramatised documentary about women that had gone missing, yet no-one knew that she was actually missing.

The film writer and director Carol Morley, reached out to people before the documentary was even commissioned, her campaign was for that anybody that knew Joyce Vincent to reach out, then when people reached out to say they knew her they didn't actually know what had happened to her until their interview day.

This method this called actuality and the style of the documentary is a mixture of Expository documentary and Performative Documentary style.

What was most interesting about the opening of the film is that the information was drip feed, we saw images of news articles, we saw newspaper clippings of what had happened and we had previews of the people that were going to appear in the documentary.

We saw images of a taxi driving around with the producer's number on it, for weeks they drove around and this is how they got their contributors.
Below is one of the trailers form the Docu-drama.

From an artistic point of view, these pieces I watched in the introduction and that were put on the screen to entice the audience pulled me into the world of integument and it takes a lot for me to be interested I a subject that I have 'seen before', although I am a fan of Dramatic documentaries I also like a bit of real life too, this means if something is going to be re-enacted it has to be done correctly for my full attention but the part played so well by Zawe Ashton, whom I recognised for her later role in fresh meat, playing the role of 'Vod'.

I thought the film was executed well with a mixture of interviews and drama, the acting was what made the film interesting to watch and the portrayal of what Joyce was actually like came from the people who were interviewed.

In our documentary, we also have a dramatised sequence and by observing this film, it has come to my understanding the importance of lighting and framing, although I am not the camera operator or the director I would like to have the same effect on our re-enactment as we saw in this film. In some frames, the camera was held on the subject for a long period of time to create tension whilst there was no commentary or atmos sound, I really felt like I was apart of her life, in the room with her, experiencing her feelings through her expressions. We are not having a professional actor but we are re-enacting a real thing that actually happened to the person we are interviewing so hopefully we can capture the essence of the realness that this film did and do it well enough to have a good reaction from the audience.